The action of the police in Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 22 became a leading topic in the country – 22 detainees, among them high-ranking police officers and businessmen, all of them connected to the drug trade.
However, these arrests raise the curtain on an extremely large, deep and influential network of contacts, at the center of which stands one of the most dangerous people in Europe.
According to Bosnian authorities, all 22 detainees are linked to the international drug cartel led by Edin Gačanin “Tito”, a man whom Americans call “Europe’s Pablo Escobar” and whom the FBI describes as one of the 50 biggest players in the global drug market .
His drug distribution network, called the Tito and Dino Cartel, stretches from the Balkans, through Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, all the way to Dubai and Peru.
According to authorities in the South American country, Tito has developed a huge base there that has made him the biggest buyer of cocaine.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) claims that the Tito and Dino cartel, led by Gachanin, is one of the main players in drug trafficking in Europe, controlling a third of the cocaine that enters Europe through the port of Rotterdam.
The action of the Bosnian State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) is a serious blow to Edin Gačanin’s organization in his homeland.
Gachanin’s criminal empire began precisely in the Netherlands, where for years neither the local police nor the European police authorities had any idea who exactly was hiding behind the pseudonym “Tito”.
By 2020, the Bosnian already organized large-scale shipments of drugs directly from South America, passing them through the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg, and his activities were also noticed by the American authorities.
Tito is known to work quite directly with the Irish Kinahan cartel, the Neapolitan Camorra mafia, as well as the Montenegrin Kavach clan.
In 2021, a large-scale operation by the DEA and the national police of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Germany, Spain and Colombia dismantled a network directly linked to Gačanin.
More than 2.6 tons of drugs were seized then, but more importantly for the investigators, they found traces of the structure of the “Tito and Dino” cartel.
Soon after, the identity of the Balkan drug lord was also revealed, thanks to the cracking of the encrypted chat application Sky ECC, used by many criminal organizations to communicate.
The Dutch authorities brought charges against him for importing drugs into the country, but by that time Gachanin had already moved to Dubai, from where he ran his criminal empire.
Until October 2022, one of the largest anti-drug operations to date – “Desert Light”, involving Europol, DEA, police forces in several European countries and authorities in the United Arab Emirates.
A total of 49 people were detained during the operation, and Europol proudly declares that they have broken a “supercartel” responsible for importing 1/3 of the cocaine into Europe.
According to the information disseminated at the time, the scale with which Tito acted exceeded even that of the Mexican gangster El Chapo. This gives the DEA reason to call him “Europe’s Escobar”.
In March last year, the US imposed sanctions on Gachanin for his role in international drug trafficking.
However, the joy of European and American police authorities is premature.
Communication between the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands, which is seeking Gachanin’s extradition, is frankly lame, and he has remained in the hands of the Dubai police for over a year.
In November 2023, a court in Rotterdam sentenced the Bosnian to seven years in prison in absentia and fined him one million euros after he struck a deal with Dutch prosecutors.
Instead of extraditing him, however, in January of this year, the Dubai authorities released Gachanin on bail. Soon after, there was no trace of him. To this day, the whereabouts of the gangster remain unknown.
Bosnian authorities now hope their crackdown can bring the investigation closer to Gačanin’s rediscovery.
It is hoped that the arrests will at least cripple his criminal network in his homeland and provide information on where he may be hiding.
Monday’s police operation was conducted in three cities and targeted individuals suspected of involvement in “organized crime, illegal trafficking of significant amounts of drugs, money laundering and related crimes,” according to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Prosecutor’s Office.
The operation, codenamed Black Tie 2, was carried out with the help of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), DEA and Europol.
According to Sarajevo-based Oslobodenje, among those detained are Mustafa Selmanovic, head of the specialized police unit of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the country’s two regions, and Vahidin Munic, acting director of the Federation’s Police Directorate.
Also detained are businessmen Gordan Memija from Sarajevo and Haris Behram from Mostar, as well as Tarik Zulovic, manager of a hospital in the central Bosnian city of Zenica, with authorities suspecting ties to Gačanin and his Tito and Dino cartel.
Several officers of the specialized police were also found in handcuffs, allegedly serving as bodyguards for the mobster during his visit to Sarajevo in 2016.
The cartel reportedly recruited many people from Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as neighboring countries to set up companies in the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Their goal was to use these businesses to launder the huge revenues that the Tito and Dino cartel generated from drug trafficking.
According to the Bosnian authorities, the profits are worth billions of dollars.
Work is yet to be done to further crack down on this money laundering scheme. But could this end the empire of this Bosnian Pablo Escobar? Until his own arrest, this remains controversial.
